The dolphins make their appearance again early in the morning. We have been sailing east for a week now so the sunrise is earlier every day. Today, when I take over from Martijn at 3:00, it already starts to rise. The dolphins come to tell me that its fish o’clock, so I throw out the lure. We have eaten all our meat and had a vegetarian meal yesterday. Time to catch a nice tuna or dorade!

In the morning while getting dressed, it hits me that we have at least 2 more weeks at sea to go. What the hell am I going to wear? I only have 3 shorts, of which one I can’t find and another is so salty I can’t fit into it anymore. Am I going to wear the same shorts for THREE weeks in a row? The guys are encouraging me to ‘look with my hands’ and dig deeper to find my missing shorts. I give up after a few minutes of being thrown around in the front of the boat and wear my same shorts again.

The day stays windy, the wind picks up in the afternoon. The waves also start to build. We see that behind us, more to the west, a system of high winds is appearing. We are going to stay exactly at the edge of it (according to the forecast, and hopefully) so we will have some decent winds, but no gales or breaking waves. The gusts should stay under 25 knots and the waves under 2 meters. That is better than our whole southern Atlantic crossing, so we’re not worried. Our friends on Matenka aren’t so lucky, they didn’t make a lot of progress because they have had little wind. Quote when they heard about our first few windy days: ‘What Atlantic are you guys on?’

We spend the day reading books, sun tanning, fishing, solving rubiks cube, baking brownies, watching movies, playing Tetris and listening to podcasts. When the sailing is smooth, all the days blend into one blur of chilling in the sun, nice sundowners in the evening and a good 8 hour sleep after shift. Life is good onboard Scehawk!

Nothing on the line!

When you want to play Tetris but the phone is charging on the solar panel

The highlight of everyday is at around 15:15, when the new weather forecast is available for download. Today, the weather forecast is accompanied by brownies and good news. It seems we are exactly on a golden course where we do have wind, but not too much of it and it will take us so far in the next days that we will avoid a big no wind gap this weekend.

Weirdest thing we saw floating by today: a wooden spatula.

At this moment, Ben started cooking dinner, Thomas has shift and Martijn is writing emails on the sat phone. Life gets a little bit harder because of the waves crashing into the boat, while the boat is speeding through the water with 9 knots.

After a while, we decide to reef the main sail away and the sailing gets more comfortable. Not comfortable to sleep though.. It is very hot, the water temperature is 28 degree here and at night it doesn’t get much colder. We can’t open the hatches because we don’t like seawater in our beds, so inside the boat its a sweaty sauna.

After a week of overdosing meat before it went off, we are entering a week where we are overdosing eggs. Tonight Ben cooks a tortilla and roasted veggies from the oven. We have scrambled eggs on toast for lunch and cornflakes for breakfast.

Pos: 40 07 N, 56 37 W
Miles of the day: 163 (152 towards Cork)
Miles to go: 2133
Highlight of the day: Making great progress without any work, Scehawk is flying! We change the clock and I get 2- instead of 3-hour shift!
Drama of the day: Thomas twists his back weird and has back aches all day. He has taken so many painkillers it is making him nauseous. We lost a second lure.
Weather: hot and sunny
Food: Tortilla with roasted veggies